Olivia Aherne: Okay, I think we'll get started. Hello everyone, welcome. My name is Olivia Aherne, I'm the Curator of Commissions here at Chisenhale Gallery and it's my pleasure to introduce tonight's conversation between artist Dan Guthrie and writer Olamiju Fajemisin. This marks the second event programmed as part of Dan Guthrie's Chisenhale Gallery commission, Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure, which is currently on view in the gallery until the 17th of August.

The show marks a major new commission and first institutional exhibition in London by Guthrie, whose practice explores representations and mis-representations of Black Britishness. By deliberately experimenting with form and language, Guthrie probes the limits of visual representation, questioning not only what is shown but what remains unseen or unsayable on screen.

This commission continues Guthrie's long-standing engagement with the Black Boy Clock, an objective contested heritage publicly displayed in his hometown of Stroud, Gloucestershire. Guthrie's long-standing, the clock, which incorporates a wooden blackamoor figure in its design, was originally assembled by a local watchmaker in 1774 during the height of the transatlantic slave trade. Guthrie's exhibition includes two new videos that put forward the radical un-conservation of the clock, a new theoretical concept proposed by Guthrie to describe the strategic acquisition of an object in order to destroy it.

Dan and Olamiju will be in conversation for about 45 minutes and there will be time at the end for any questions. I will now introduce each of tonight's speakers by way of their bios.

Dan Guthrie lives and works in the UK. Selected exhibitions and screenings include Absent Forces, Open City Documentary Film Festival, 2024, Two Films, VOLT, Devonshire Collective, Eastbourne, 2023, Spirit Messages touring programme 23-24, Selected 13 touring programme, FLAMIN and videoclub, 2023, wave 4, Prismatic Ground, New York 2023, and Right of Way, LUX, London, 2023.

Olamiju Fajemisin is a writer based in New York. She studied at the Courtauld Institute, London and the Sandberg Insituut, Amsterdam. She is Director at Clearing New York and Los Angeles.

Thank you for listening, Over to you two.

Olamiju Fajemisin: Thank you so much, Olivia, for your wonderful introduction. Thank you so much, everyone, for being here tonight. Thank you, Dan, for being in conversation with me. Thank you, everyone, at Chisenhale, Ed especially, for having me this evening. This is a real pleasure. So in the spirit of this exhibition, I want to do something very quickly.

I'll begin by reading very directly. I'm addressing you, Dan, slash you, plural, the audience, by speaking from a note off of my phone. My notes are organised under the following subheadings. Introduction, slash, the exhibition, as a quote, gesamtkunstwerk, language and references.

And that's the end of that. I just wanted to set up a framework. This isn't going to be like a Q&A as much as a conversation. But in the discussions Dan and I have had over the past couple weeks, I mean, we had lunch this afternoon, and we had a Zoom a couple weeks ago.

It's funny, in all of those conversations, we always had to kind of shut ourselves up. Didn't want to burn through the fuel of what the next 45 minutes should be, or what I think it's going to be, or what I hope it's going to be. So yeah, introduction, slash, the exhibition, as a gesamtkunstwerk.

I'm thinking specifically about what it was like to enter Chisenhale today. It's a very hot day, and it was a relief to kind of come into this tunnel-like space. And I was just on the phone.I'd been on a call with my headphones, and, you know, it's just like, there's a lot of noise. So it took a moment to adjust to being in the space. Not yet in the exhibition necessarily, although we can discuss that.

But it struck me, all the chatter, or the fact that even before I stepped into the space, you can almost already hear the introduction being read out, or through the speakers if they're not on someone's head. And then you can see Empty Alcove, kind of alter-like in its presentation. It's, like, centred beautifully when you're standing on the, if you stand on the corner of the school where I've been smoking several cigarettes this afternoon, you feel like you're already in the exhibition, even if you're not.

And then you go around the corner, and you're met or interrupted by, or kind of imposed by this black box. It's very interesting that in the pamphlet for the exhibition, in the work list, the only materials that are listed are, I mean, not even the materials, but the details of the film, like this moving image and the number of minutes. There's a lot that can be said.

And full disclosure, we agreed that it would be better to get into the materials of the exhibition. When there's so much discourse, I think it's nice to focus on those elements.

It's not a question as much as an observation, but I'd love to speak with you first about the different elements of the exhibition, the architecture of the exhibition, the arrangement of the exhibition. Why you chose not to include all those details, I mean, down to the details of, like, the speaker, or the kind of MDF used to create the black box, whether that's a conscious decision or not.

But I think it's a very bold statement. It's very hard to imagine what this exhibition is about without having experienced it physically in person. So having just had my first experience of the exhibition this afternoon, it feels very right to reflect on that with you now.

Dan Guthrie: Yeah. I mean at the end of the day, the work is about these two video pieces, Empty Alcove and Rotting Figure, like, so much so, that is the name of the show, Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure. And the reason why the box isn't in that list is I wanted that to be a bit of a surprise for people. Chisenhale has such a strong history of very academic, very stripped-back presentations, it's almost a bit of a hallmark, and I sort of wanted to put my own spin on that.

Like, you come in and you're imagining you're going to watch these videos, and actually you're confronted with something that requires you to navigate through the space. You know, it's not a sort of very passive black box cinema. You walk in and you're very much aware of your own relationship to all these works as you come in and walk around.

It's funny what you said about the altar-like presence of Empty Alcove. I almost didn't notice how visible it was from the street until I came back here this afternoon with you. I'd spent so much time in the install looking at, like, the precise positioning of everything. And then as we turned the corner, I was like, oh, I can see the show in front of me. With the shutters up, it really does kind of beckon you in this sort of window to another place, another world. Especially because, you know, for a long time the windows at Chisenhale were closed up, and it was this kind of bunker-like space.

And only in the last couple of years there was an exhibition where the windows were finally revealed, and you have this glorious outside world that seeps into the gallery, especially with the way that the light comes in. So adding an extra window to that vista, I guess, with Empty Alcove, feels like a really nice way of responding to the space.

OF: Yeah, windows and portals, I think, are key, like, concepts architecturally, thinking or speaking. The black box is certainly a portal or a coffin or something. I didn't enter it. [laughter] I felt very… okay, I was happy to… I mean, I already told you that the way the chairs are arranged, I wouldn't know which chair to sit in.

DG: Yeah. [laughter]

OF: I wouldn’t... I mean, I would feel as if there was something behind me, almost. It's very foreboding. When I think of a black box, it can mean anything. It's kind of this universal euphemism. I generally associate the black box with the gadget on the plane that tells you the story of the aftermath. There's this incredibly funerary aspect of the black box, and that feels rather proper in this context. I mean, you described it as a prop earlier, which I thought made a lot of sense, rather than exhibition architecture or furniture or even like a presentational device. Very much a prop in this… Is it fair to say a two-part dramaturgy?

DG: It's definitely a two-parter. The idea I had in my head was this kind of A-side, B-side mentality. You know, like one work doesn't exist without the other. A lot of what makes the work so special is the proximity between the two, how they bleed into each other, how they overlap.

And yeah, the box does feel like a prop. It's very much a way of creating a sense of suspense, a sense of unease and discomfort. I think if the work was presented in a screening room somewhere else in this building, it wouldn't have the same impact.

OF: Certainly. I think proximity is really interesting and really important. There's a proximity between the chairs arranged in an arch in front of Empty Alcove. And then in this kind of quadrat school exam formation in Rotting Figure. There’s a proximity between the sounds in both works and the different ways the sounds are also projected, whether it's the surround sound speaker or the overhead. It creates a sense of uncertainty, which I think is very important for this presentation.

It would be worth talking about speculation and how these films, I say this because I'm looking now and I can see the back of Empty Alcove on the screen behind us and thinking of the speculative nature of that, work as a projection or a possibility for what could happen with the alcove where the Blackboy currently is.

DG: Yeah, I think speculation's a really interesting way of working. The sort of work that I'd made before had been very retrospective, looking back at things that had happened or might not have happened, and trying to fill in cracks and with the idea of what gets recorded in archives, whereas this is very much a forward-looking work. And I say work, to talk about this wider body of work, as both Empty Alcove and Rotting Figure imagine futures that don't currently exist, which I think is a really interesting register to work with.

OF: I agree with that. Earlier you said, ‘we're in an exhibition space, I want to give you a show’, when we were talking about how information-heavy, kind of, the context of this work is. And yet how minimal and slick… I can't remember if it was slick or sleek. Both would apply…

DG: Slick and sleek.

OF: Slick and sleek, this presentation is. Is that withholding? Is that refusal?

DG: I think it’s a refusal to make a certain type of film that could be made about this object. There's a world in which I could have made, an hour-long documentary about this clock, with so many close-ups and cutaways and talking heads and me just delivering this very didactic voiceover to you. But I made the decision to strip back a lot of that history, put it on the website, earf.info, that we can talk more about in a bit, and really cut to what the crux of what the work is. What if we removed this object and destroyed it? And doing that by being as direct as possible with the visual messaging.

Because there's a world in which there was a timeline that spanned the walls of the gallery, and you would have come in and been overwhelmed with information and probably not taken all of it in. Whereas here you can go away and digest all this history on your own time. Whether that's skimming through the website on the bus on the way back or sitting down with a coffee on a Saturday and really, like, going deep on the footnotes.

OF: What have people reported to you about their experiences after the show, of skimming through on the website on the bus, as you say, or going away and looking at the timeline after they've had a moment to digest what they saw here?

DG: I’ve had a lot of good feedback. I think people appreciate the fact that you don't have to be an expert to follow this history. I think sometimes the way that these stories are written can be very academic and overwhelming. But what's good about the website is that it has all these different entry points. You can filter the whole timeline of entries to look at the history of the clock, or my personal history, or the history of the local newspaper. With that route particularly, seeing the language that’s used to describe it over time is really fascinating. What I was really keen to do was show that a history of the clock doesn't exist without all these different intertwining histories, Like, it's not an object that kind of lives in isolation, it’s an object that exists in the world and we have to talk about it as being part of the world.

OF: I mean, the language of it all. There's just so much to say there. It's a lot of highly academic language, it's a lot of historic language, it's a lot of language out of context. The language of the introduction is fascinating for me, going between this kind of disembodied... well, not disembodied, but an unidentified voice until she is identified when you interrupt.

I was telling you earlier that I was really interested in the etymology of blackamoor. Turns out it's black and moor just put together, but Moor is like a capitalized noun, historically referring to a northern African convert from Christianity to Islam. Well, technically, in southern Spain. So it's already very abstract. And it's interesting to me that that word, the capitalized of the black and moor, would be the second part of the word. Mm-hmm. And then, I mean I screenshotted it here and can read it quickly.

On Wikipedia, it says, ‘Blackamoor, brackets, decorative arts. Blackamoor is a type of figure and visual trope in European decorative art typically found in works from the early modern period.’ Early modern being an incredible euphemism for the worst time in human history. ‘And depicting a man of sub-Saharan African descent, usually in clothing that suggests high status.’ So, in the case of the Blackboy clock, he's wearing, like, this kind of very exoticized…

DG: Gold leaf skirt.

OF: Banana leaf, gold leaf skirt. Exactly. ‘Common examples of items and objects decorated in the blackamoor style include sculpture, jewelry, and furniture’, which I found very interesting. There's this kind of functional, or functionality, usually applied to, or described of the blackamoor figure in art historically.

I was wondering, if you know, to what extent is the Blackboy actually a functional element of the clock? Because I understand that his club, and I can't even believe I'm saying out loud, his club beats the bell every hour on the hour, which is, you know, something, but he could technically be removed and the clock would still function.

And also the fact that his design is attributed to this horologist. Obviously it's very detailed and technical work, but one wonders if that man who made the clock actually would have sculpted the figure himself or whether he commissioned it from someone else. Um, sorry, I'm going off on a tangent.

DG: I think there's so much to unpack with the way it’s been constructed. I've never heard the clock working as it's meant to.

OF: You’ve never heard it, the bell?

DG: Never heard it working, which I think really is testament to how much people care about this object.

OF: Sentimentally speaking.

DG: Yeah, I think it's sentimental care, like, this object has always been there, therefore we must look after it.

But no one's actually willing to put in that effort to make it work. It's this position where they say ‘we can't remove history’, but if this thing isn’t functional, if it's not telling the time, it's just there to reinforce the status quo using outdated imagery. ‘It's there because it's always been there’ is the mindset.

OF: So let's talk about comfort and discomfort. The clock is there because people felt comfortable to put it there and it's still there because it would be uncomfortable to remove it, or is it because they're comfortable with it now?

DG: I think some people would think they're comfortable with it being there. Some people would say it's uncomfortable to remove it. But I think the reason why it's still there is because the people who are responsible for it don't want to engage with the growing discomfort for it. I think they're very much in a mindset where if we don't engage, if we don't respond, then it can just stay there. It’s cliche but that silence approach really does speak volumes. Especially when, as you can see from the consultation quotes flashing up behind us, there was so much emotion around it, whether that's positive or negative.

I think it will probably stay where it is for the foreseeable because of that awkward tension between people wanting it to go, and the complex bureaucracy that keeps the clock in place.

OF: We should then get into conservation versus radical un-conservation, as you coined. I think the addition of the un-prefix is really interesting. These kinds of additions and subtractions seem to be a very important part of your work. How did you arrive at that phrase? What led you to using it?

DG: I mean, the genesis of this commission was that I'd been approached for a studio visit and I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about? And the same day as the studio visit, I had a meeting with the council that was all about what do we do with this clock? And things were in a stalemate position, as they still are. And throughout that meeting, in my head I was thinking, what if we just destroyed it?

And the reason why I call it un-conservation is because conservation is like an act of care, right? The act of keeping something alive in perpetuity for the benefit of future generations. My thinking was what if we took that care element but subverted it? What if the way to preserve or benefit future generations was to take on this object with care and destroy it.

OF: That would be more caring than repairing the clock at this stage. If they cared, the clock would be working, surely.

DG: Yeah, exactly.

OF: It would be more dignified for the black boy if he were to be destroyed, no?

DG: It's an object tha was rotting in the 1970s, rotting in the early 2000s. It's likely rotting now because it's covered in bird shit that's kind of corrosive. The caring thing to do is…

OF: Put it out of its misery.

DG: Exactly. Let it rot.

OF: I don't like referring to the blackboy as a 'black boy'.

DG: Yeah, we had this discussion earlier, how to refer to the object. It feels weird to call it he, because so many of these articles from the sixties, seventies, eighties, even the early noughties refer to it as ‘he’ or ‘him’, using phrases like ‘we need to make sure he's working for the benefit of our town.’ I had to do that unlearning when I started talking about the clock because I was so absorbed in the language that other people had been using. Yeah, I tend to call it ‘the figure’ these days, to try and treat it as a sculpture rather than a representation of a person, or something overly personified.

OF: I think that refusal or negation is also an act of care. So radical un-conservation was the first of three key words I asked you for earlier, that you thought were central to this exhibition. And then you said presence, and I misheard you, I thought you said present, and then you said absence. And again, I still thought you said present, so I was like, it's so interesting that you would say present and then absence, kind of like the noun, and then, you know, yeah, this kind of ongoing act or this lack.

I think present / absent dichotomies are foundational to this presentation. I don't want to say your work, just because this is the first time I've seen it in person, but based on how you arrived at this presentation, how it's developed, and what we've discussed, and what you've shared with me, presence, absence seems to be everything.

That’s the slash, no? The unpronounceable slash.

DG: Definitely. I think something that was key for this project was how do we talk about an object, and discuss an object, and almost show an object without actually showing it.

It took a lot of time to work out what the best way of doing that was, to give people enough information so they can understand what they're looking at without replicating the offensive imagery. It didn't feel right to reproduce something that I think shouldn't be on public display in order to critique it.

And so a lot of that research was looking at how other people worked with these racist objects in the real world. It’s a lot of impromptu coverings. You know, these thrown up bin bags and tape or hastily constructed wooden coverings, both of which were visual reference points for Rotting Figure.

But then also taking that thinking across to the access materials, the captions and the audio description, which is all about trying to convey what you can experience in the gallery. And that kind of felt the perfect opportunity to explore how to think about how we interact with this object. Particularly with the audio description, which is trying to say what is being shown, but also think about what isn't seen at the same time.

That's why there's this conversation between two voices, the first of which is Elaine, playing this very factual, straight to the point audio describer. She does that as her job, that’s not an insult. But then I come through as this countering, critiquing voice, trying to draw attention to what isn't there or what's been removed. And we play with that dynamic throughout.

OF: So when there are trigger warnings or content warnings for ‘racist imagery or potentially offensive imagery’, I think those are the words that were used on the earf.info site, who are you thinking about when you put those up?

DG: I'm thinking about the people who want to read up on the project and then have that inspire some kind of change in their life. I did a version of the show in Stroud between the show at Spike Island and the show here at Chisenhale, where I took Empty Alcove back home for two weeks and just invited people in to come and have a chat.

And I gave a load of copies of one of the essays for the website, Lola Olufemi’s amazing piece, to a local youth group. I just said do what you want with these, distribute them, start a reading group, up to you. The warnings are for them. For people who want to read up about this object and feel the frustration and the tension that comes with the work and say that ‘actually, I want to make a change’.

OF: And then back in terms of what we said earlier about the form of the exhibition itself, the installation, the gesamtkunstwerk, versus the information. It seems like it just made more sense to do the absence part in real life and the presence part in this kind of digiverse. This, well not never ending, but potentially infinite resource that can grow and educate.

DG: It will grow with time. In fact, I added an entry to it yesterday, which is that I was nominated for a Stroud News and Journal ‘diversity in the community award’, which is Stroud’s local paper. I got sent a PDF certificate this afternoon that's now up on the website, you can check it out for yourself.

It’s a goodwill gesture but this is the same publication that at the height of the consultation was publishing reactionary readers letters saying that ‘I think English colonialism did more good than bad’ in order to capitalise off the discourse and drive people to their Facebook page or website. That was in 2022 and now three years later, they’re saying ‘here’s your diversity award for all the great work you’ve done’.

OF: I mean, the world is ruled by such contradictions. Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure is a contradiction. It’s contradictory to witness both the kidnapping and the death of the figure at the same time. The absence and then the collapsing figure inside this horrifying black bin bag. It's very humorous in a dark way.

DG: Yeah, it's the sort of thing where you kind of have to laugh through it.

OF: If you don't laugh…

DG: What else can you do? But going back to Facebook, in a lot of the comments sections, the prevailing opinions are that ‘you're going to erase history, you’re going to ruin everything by removing the past’. And then here I have actually erased history to prove that, actually, this all looks fine. The top of the building still looks like the top of a building and the world isn't going to fall apart.

And again these comments about ‘destroying history’, okay, well I'm going to destroy the clock and again, the world's not going to fall apart. We're all sat here watching this virtual thing unfold and nothing is really changing in the world around us. So if it did ever happen in real life, everything would be fine.

OF: In the introduction, Elaine says that you're imagining the future of the Blackboy Clock, which feels like another one of those contradictions because you're not imagining his, or its future, you’re imagining its demise. Does the potential destruction or end of the Blackboy clock become absence? It's just a transformation of its presence. Do you ever fantasise about a world in which this sculpture, or clock has never existed?

DG: I don't think it could never not exist.

OF: Did you ever imagine what life would be like if it didn't?

DG: I think it'd be largely the same. The object is symptomatic of everything that happened with the transatlantic slave trade and its afterlives and its aftermaths. Nothing fundamentally would be different if it didn't exist, and nothing fundamentally would be different if I removed it now.

I think it kind of needs to exist in order to not exist. We need to know what that brutal presence looks like as a commonplace occurrence in the day to day, in an on the street way, to say actually no, we need to make a change. It’s a very concrete manifestation of a lot of things. Removing this one object won't change history, but the fact that we can remove it shows that other worlds are possible.

OF: I'm going to keep talking about fantasy. Do you ever fantasize about how you would remove it? What you would do with it? Would you sling a rope up there like a lasso and pull it down? Or go up with a ladder or get a crane?

DG: I think a cherry picker would feel very nice. Slowly rising up to take it and then come down again. Very sleek. Very elegant.

OF: I really want you to do that.

DG: I kind of want to do it too. [laughter] But I don't know what I would do with it after. I don’t think ‘I’ want to destroy it. I think it needs to be a collective effort. What I propose in the show is one hypothetical situation using an abstract method of destruction, all these slow creaks and cracks. I think much like how we asked for people's opinions on what should happen back in 2021, we should ask again. If we're going to destroy it, how should we do it? What is the way that has the most resonance and the most closure for the most people? When you have an exhibition about your work and your name's on the door, people think you have ownership of this one object. But it's something for the whole of Stroud to reckon with.

OF: It’s very interesting how the exhibition centres on an object that isn't here. That is not going to come here, sadly, maybe not sadly, I don't know. But the presence and absence is the strong impulse of this presentation.I want to talk about subtitles. I know I'm jumping around a little bit. But when you said just now about how this is your proposal of what could happen or what should happen to the object. Technically, that's just a description of squelching and creaking and cracking wood, and it's a very visceral, very gruesome depiction. I'm the kind of person that needs to watch everything with subtitles.

DG: So am I.

OF: Yeah. Okay. I was going to ask you that. Are you the kind of person who can't hear what they're listening to unless there are subtitles on?

DG: It's not that I can't hear, but I think I need them sometimes to lock into the narrative. But yeah, when I was working with them on this project it came down to the question of how to represent something in a way that's not truly neutral? With Rotting Figure, for example, they literally describe all the creaks and cracks as wooden creaks, wooden cracks. But then this orange text comes in as a contrast, a subjective voice that describes these sounds as colonial figures rotting, that extra level of detail that comes from this position of non-neutrality.

OF: The orange text being you.

DG: Yes.

OF: Interestingly justified to the other side of the page when they’re on the website. I mean, you were talking about neutrality. How can one ever be neutral with the English language? Every word choice is loaded. And I think your decision to work with Elaine really illustrates this. She doesn't struggle to get back into her cadence of speech after your interruptions.

She embodies what we witness presently, what we witness all the time, what we've been witnessing for years. This very uncomfortable or comfortable, I don't know exactly where they sit, but this bystanderhood or this witnessship, the one who's observing and describing.

What was most fascinating to me about her description was how she situated me in the space, and then everything else that was happening, I kind of had to find my own words for. In a way your additions or your interruptions, as I prefer to refer to them, really articulate not necessarily what I'm witnessing in terms of the artwork, but what the artwork is making me feel. What the artwork is reminding me of, the semantics of the artwork itself. Can you speak a little bit more about your work with Elaine and the writing of the script?

DG: Yeah, it was very much a collaborative process. So Elaine worked on the audio description and then Anita worked on the captions. They’re it's two separate organisations, SoundScribe on the audio description, Carefuffle on the captions. But with both of them, it was a Google Doc affair. We watched all the videos together or listened to the videos together and then started sketching out these narratives. Them coming at it from a very factual point of view, like having to quite literally get across their task of description, whilst having the flexibility to play with that and allow that countering voice in. 

What I found so interesting was that for both organisations, they work with visually impaired and auditory impaired consultants, who give them feedback on the way that we’ve described everything. Listening to their interpretation of what we've done to see whether it actually did the job was really fascinating. Especially when you think you're describing something well, and they go, no, I can't quite conceptualise or what you're trying to say. And doing that whilst also trying not to describe something too much and trying to walk that tightrope of what is too much detail and what's not enough detail. What are we purposely leaving out of the narrative for creative effect?

OF: I mean, it's a wonderful balance that you've struck. Again, I really struggled to get my bearings of the installation when I was just looking at the installation shots. Not that it's not clear, once I'm here, it's entirely clear. And yet there's something very obstructive about the way that the exhibition has been designed.

I keep coming back to the forward slash between Empty Alcove and Rotting Figure. Because things seem to come in twos in this presentation. There's two films. There's the audio described version of the films, there’s the subtitled version of the films. It seems very necessary for this presentation to be going between these two kinds of language and these different kinds of articulating oneself very directly, very kind of abruptly, and then not at all somehow.

DG: Yeah, I think this comes down to all the perspectives around the clock, all these debates, all these different viewpoints that you see flashing up on the screen behind us.

There was no singular ‘this is the take’ on the object. So I didn’t want there to be a singular take on what I'm trying to say here. There's a world in which I could have made just one of these videos, and that could have been the final show.

But if I was removing the figure to make an Empty Alcove, you want to know where it ends up. And if I was just showing it rotting, you kind of want to see what the day-to-day looks like. One can't exist without the other, and yeah I think that's why it's Empty Alcove slash Rotting Figure. It almost feels a disservice to only call this show Rotting Figure or Empty Alcove. Like, they're very much two distinct videos, but it is one wider body of work.

I've ummed and ahhed about whether one could be presented without the other, and I feel like, no, you'd be missing something. You'll be missing how the imposing presence of the screening room has an effect on you while you're watching Empty Alcove, or how you can be sat watching Rotting Figure and hear the birdsong and the kids in between the cracks.

OF: They are two halves of a whole. The figure is rotting because the alcove is empty. Going back to the black box…

DG: It’s interesting because you mentioned earlier over lunch, you said you couldn't go into it, and then when we came here earlier, I walked you walk around to the entrance and then swerve. [laughter] I could see you trying, but I could tell that your body was like, ‘I don't need to go in there’.

OF: I think it would just be too visceral somehow. Like, as I told you yesterday, I was watching the film on a loop while kind of falling asleep, and the sounds are very intense. It's wood, and yet it sounds like bones. I wasn't listening with headphones, but I may as well have been, the laptop speaker can be really intense.

I think I was scared of the overhead speaker. As I said earlier, it really feels like someone is whispering into your ear, or, that I’m wearing airpods that I don't know that I have in. I mean, I will probably go in after this conversation.

DG: You’re going to have to physically march yourself in.

OF: This time with a glass of wine to relax me. [laughter]

DG: But I’m so glad it has that effect. When I was making the work, obviously I started with the video, and then you think about the install, but I knew it wouldn't all come together until everything was in the room. The videos were finished right at the start of the year but they weren’t finished for me until they went into the space.

A lot of this work is about confronting this subject at eye level. I only saw a photo of the figure not on the building just as I was coming to the end of production. When it was taken down for restoration whilst it was rotting in the seventies, someone at the Stroud Museum took some photos of it. And one day, someone at the council randomly found these unlabeled pictures on a local history website and sent them to me. Seeing them made me realise that every time I’d seen a photo of the clock, the camera's always been looking up at it.

So that’s why in this installation, both works are at eye level.

With Empty Alcove, you’re confronting that absence directly without having to crane your neck. And for Rotting Figure, the object at the start of the video is the height that it is in real life. Which means that in the black box, you can really get up close to it and look at it square on for once.

OF: Which makes me so uncomfortable, because he's a young boy. There are horrifying erotics to this sculpture. Some of the other blackamoor figures I was looking at online, they're mostly men, adults, at least. I mean, him being a child and him now being on top of a schoolhouse, referred to as the black boys' school, as you said, this all just seems horribly unfair. I wonder what or who the figure was modelled on, or how it was created. I'm curious also about how they arrive at this skin tone. It's mahogany dark, impossibly black.

DG: Tar black, almost blue, the way it shows up in photos.

OF: I imagine the finish must be quite like the black box itself.

DG: Yeah it is, that’s deliberate.

OF: Kind of this weathered… I mean, I know this is MDF, but it's kind of like a matte finish. You can see how it’s seeped into the wood, you can see the grain of the wood. This made me think of the black boy and what it must be like to be closer to him visually.

Congratulations on your presentation. Like, I haven't said that yet. I mean, I just told you personally, but I’m saying it now in this context. The black box is a particularly strong gesture, which came up when we were looking through some different references. AGHDRA, the 2021 film by Arthur Jafa, being one of them, and while there's no black box in that film, the first time I saw it, it was a premiere at Luma Arle in 2021.

And it was shown in a black box, rather than a white cube, it was like a darkened exhibition hall. And there were several, I believe they were shipping containers dotted around the space that had also been blackened or lacquered in black. And I also didn't enter them, as I told you, until the last day I was there. It was out of fear. It was against my human instinct to enter, like, a large…

DG: Dark black room. (laughter)

OF: Yeah. A large black box. I mean, there's a lot of differences between this presentation and his uniquely different work. But the imposition of his film, Arthur's film, it's 85 minutes of digitally animated, roiling sea sunset with these black churning rocks and a very dramatic soundtrack. I mean, not dramatic, but very intense in the way it was played, very bass heavy and I could feel my organs rattling with it. Almost the same way I can feel my brain rattling with the overhead speaker in the room next door.

It's really… I mean, it's interesting what can be done with sound. Again, I go back to the word, gesamtkunstwerk, but the combination of materials, of sculptural installation, sound and moving image, we’re able to create a work that, you know, one can have several encounters with it over an hour whilst being at Chisenhale.

I mean, I've been here all afternoon and gone back into the exhibition a couple of times, you know, for five minutes at a time, because somehow it's also a lot to take in, even though there's not that much there in the space. There’s a lot to deal with as a human body.

DG: Yeah, I wanted to make something that got to the point. The works are five minutes each, but you can sit with those five minutes over the course of an hour, a day. You can come back and view it again. They're just two fairly static shots to be as direct as possible. You can come in and walk around and take a photo and leave, but if you sit with the work and indulge in the captions and the audio description and go check out the website after and think about it all, it can have a lasting effect on you.

OF: Do you have any future plans or do you already have an idea of what you would like to do with the black boy in your future practice? Rather than destroy it.

DG: I don't know. It's interesting you say that, because before this commission, I'd been working on this campaign to get it removed. And I feel like I'm more able to articulate what I want to see happen with it outside of the art world. I can see the ramifications that this work is having in generating discourse about the clock and how it’s starting moving things forward with the conversations about its future. But I don't know what I would do with it in an art sense.

I almost want someone else to take up the mantle. Again, I have this relationship with it and it's a very unique relationship, but I think there needs to be more approaches, more people thinking about what to do with the clock. I don't want to be the authority on this subject.

OF: Of course. It’s a huge responsibility that's not yours at all. You just happen to be the one to take up on this object. Unfortunately, it seems that the artistic context or discourse is what will allow progress to be made with this sculpture, you know, whatever that may be. But kind of the flexibility of language that we, the proverbial ‘we’, in the art world are kind of open to, is what can allow discourses about this sculpture to even happen. And I feel like if things are left to the local councils of the world, unfortunately, progress will be very slow.

OF: What's your first memory of the Blackboy Clock?

DG: I mean, my first conscious memory of actually clocking it, so to speak, was probably in March 2020 when I moved back home at the start of the pandemic. But I sort of knew it was there the whole time. There must have been a moment where I walked past and looked up at it. It was restored in 2004, which is when I started primary school in a building next door to it. I walked past every day on the way there and on the way to secondary school as well.

OF: Was it like an unspoken landmark in your childhood in Stroud? That you knew to turn left at the Black Boy?

DG: It was more just always there. Like, I don't think people referred to it, which is so interesting. And then when this conversation comes up in 2021 and everyone starts talking about it, saying that you can't tear down this thing that we all care so much about. It felt so disingenuous because well, no one's really been talking about it. Like, if you care so much about it, why is there not a local history tour about it? Why are there not parades in its honour?

OF: But were people speaking about it when the Colston statue was removed in Bristol?

DG: No. I didn't speak about it then because, I mean, as we said earlier, there was a lot going on in June 2020.

OF: There was a lot going on, too much.

DG: I didn't have the energy to start an Instagram campaign. I saw how people were getting attacked online for the smallest things. And I thought I needed to go away and do my research because there just wasn't this history of the clock out there. I need to go away and do the reading and come back with knowledge and resources to actually make a change in June 2021.

OF: Sorry, those photos you referred to earlier, are they available on the website?

DG: Yeah, they're archived, they're on the website.

OF: I mean, again, you've done more for the sculpture in the past two, three years than the local council has done in forever. So it was restored in 1977 and then again in 2004. When did it stop working the last time? Do you know?

DG: I think there's reports of it not working in the 90s. But again, it may be a case where it was working and they restored it, and they, for some reason, didn't let it run. Again, it's like if you want to restore something and have pride in it, you have to own that pride. And now there is silence from the people who own that object and restored it back in 2004. It's a weird energy that's coming off them.

OF: It’s a very weird energy. It's like uniquely avoidant, like, don't touch that, it's mine. But also I'm not going to repair it. I’m not going to do anything to restore it to its original glory.

DG: Yeah, if you're going to be proud of it, be proud of it with your chest.

OF: It would be more interesting actually if someone was owning that argument. What are you planning for the rest of the summer? Stroud?

DG: Yeah, I'll go back to Stroud at some point. I think for me a lot of the summer is me being around with this show to have these conversations about it. I know that already there's conversations starting to brew up again in Stroud.

OF: How do you feel about that responsibility? It's a huge responsibility. It's a lot.

DG: I can't lie, it's a lot.

OF: I mean, it's also a lot of unpaid labour. When did you start with the site, when did you start uploading information to earf.info?

DG: That launched in January. But I went back the other day and I looked through my calendar to see the number of meetings that I’d been in about the clock.

OF: And how many?

DG: I think it was about thirty two hour meetings. Over the course of maybe two years, on Zoom, a real energy drain of a platform. And it made me realise that wow, that is a lot of time that I have spent dealing with slow bureaucracies.

OF: And if there is a movement or a motion, I mean, whatever ‘they’ decide to do, put it in a museum, wash off the bird shit, whatever, are you going to bill them in Stroud?

DG: I think I need to.

OF: I mean, you should.

DG: Stroud District Council, you'll be getting an invoice.

OF: Because if, I mean not if, when something does happen, you've been a direct actor in that, it would be unfathomable for you also not to be credited somehow.

DG: I mean money wise, 2021 to 2022, that was all unpaid. For the plaque I co-wrote with local representatives that went up in December 2024, I got paid £800 over the course of two years, which is not equitable at all. And luckily this commission at Chisenhale paid a lot better than that.

[laughter]

DG: But yeah, I need money. Reparations.